Acupuncture anesthesia was something new that emerged in the fifties and sixties during the quest for the substance of the meridians, based primarily on the fact that Chinese medicine used acupuncture for pain relief. It peaked in the seventies, when needle anesthesia was used for major surgeries in general, but the thing just didn't work, and caused countless people to suffer over the decades because of a naive idea, until it was grayed out of the history books in the early eighties.
If you want to minimize pain for your puppy, it's probably best not to mess with it so much.